Nietzsche Truth & Lies In A Nonmoral Sense ( 1873)

On Truth and Lies in a
Nonmoral Sense

(1873)

i

Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed
into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented
knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of “world history,” but
nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled
and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die. — One might invent such a fable, and
yet he still would not have adequately illustrated how miserable, how shadowy and
transient, how aimless and arbitrary the human intellect looks within nature. There
were eternities during which it did not exist. And when it is all over with the human
intellect, nothing will have happened. For this intellect has no additional mission which
would lead it beyond human life. Rather, it is human, and only its possessor and beget¬
ter takes it so solemnly — as though the world’s axis turned within it. But if we could
communicate with the gnat, we would learn that he likewise flies through the air with
the same solemnity, that he feels the flying center of the universe within himself. There
is nothing so reprehensible and unimportant in nature that it would not immediately
swell up like a balloon at the slightest puff of this power of knowing. And just as every
porter wants to have an admirer, so even the proudest of men, the philosopher, sup¬
poses that he sees on all sides the eyes of the universe telescopically focused upon his
action and thought.

It is remarkable that this was brought about by the intellect, which was certainly
allotted to these most unfortunate, delicate, and ephemeral beings merely as a device
for detaining them a minute within existence. For without this addition they would
have every reason to flee this existence as quickly as Lessings son.1 The pride con¬
nected with knowing and sensing lies like a blinding fog over the eyes and senses of
men, thus deceiving them concerning the value of existence. For this pride contains
within itself the most flattering estimation of the value of knowing. Deception is the

1 Reference to the offspring of Lessing and Eva Konig, who died on the day of his birth.

ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE (1873)

115

most general effect of such pride, but even its most particular effects contain within
themselves something of the same deceitful character.

As a means for the preserving of the individual, the intellect unfolds its principal
powers in dissimulation, which is the means by which weaker, less robust individuals
preserve themselves - since they have been denied the chance to wage the battle for
existence with horns or with the sharp teeth of beasts of prey. This art of dissimula¬
tion reaches its peak in man. Deception, flattering, lying, deluding, talking behind the
back, putting up a false front, living in borrowed splendor, wearing a mask, hiding
behind convention, playing a role for others and for oneself — in short, a continuous
fluttering around the solitary flame of vanity — is so much the rule and the law among
men that there is almost nothing which is less comprehensible than how an honest
and pure drive for truth could have arisen among them. They are deeply immersed
in illusions and in dream images; their eyes merely glide over the surface of things and
see “forms.” Their senses nowhere lead to truth; on the contrary, they are content to
receive stimuli and, as it were, to engage in a groping game on the backs of things.
Moreover, man permits himself to be deceived in his dreams every night of his life.
His moral sentiment does not even make an attempt to prevent this, whereas there
are supposed to be men who have stopped snoring through sheer will power. What
does man actually know about himself? Is he, indeed, ever able to perceive himself
completely, as if laid out in a lighted display case? Does nature not conceal most things
from him — even concerning his own body — in order to confine and lock him within
a proud, deceptive consciousness, aloof from the coils of the bowels, the rapid flow
of the blood stream, and the intricate quivering of the fibers! She threw away the key.
And woe to that fatal curiosity which might one day have the power to peer out and
down through a crack in the chamber of consciousness and then suspect that man is
sustained in the indifference of his ignorance by that which is pitiless, greedy, insatiable,
and murderous — as if hanging in dreams on the back of a tiger. Given this situation,
where in the world could the drive for truth have come from?

Insofar as the individual wants to maintain himself against other individuals, he
will under natural circumstances employ the intellect mainly for dissimulation. But at
the same time, from boredom and necessity, man wishes to exist socially and with the
herd; therefore, he needs to make peace and strives accordingly to banish from his
world at least the most flagrant bellum omnium contra omnes.2 This peace treaty brings in
its wake something which appears to be the first step toward acquiring that puzzling
truth drive: to wit, that which shall count as “truth” from now on is established. That
is to say, a uniformly valid and binding designation is invented for things, and this legis¬
lation of language likewise establishes the first laws of truth. For the contrast between
truth and lie arises here for the first time. The liar is a person who uses the valid
designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real.
He says, for example, “I am rich,” when the proper designation for his condition would
be “poor.” He misuses fixed conventions by means of arbitrary substitutions or even
reversals of names. If he does this in a selfish and moreover harmful manner, society
will cease to trust him and will thereby exclude him. What men avoid by excluding
the liar is not so much being defrauded as it is being harmed by means of fraud.
Thus, even at this stage, what they hate is basically not deception itself, but rather the

2 Latin: war of all against all. Cf. The Greek State note 5 above.

116

II EARLY WRITINGS

unpleasant, hated consequences of certain sorts of deception. It is in a similarly restricted
sense that man now wants nothing but truth: he desires the pleasant, life-preserving
consequences of truth. He is indifferent toward pure knowledge which has no conse¬
quences; toward those truths which are possibly harmful and destructive he is even
hostilely inclined. And besides, what about these linguistic conventions themselves?
Are they perhaps products of knowledge, that is, of the sense of truth? Are designations
congruent with things? Is language the adequate expression of all realities?

It is only by means of forgetfulness that man can ever reach the point of fancying
himself to possess a “truth” of the grade just indicated. If he will not be satisfied with
truth in the form of tautology, that is to say, if he will not be content with empty
husks, then he will always exchange truths for illusions. What is a word? It is the copy
in sound of a nerve stimulus. But the further inference from the nerve stimulus to a
cause outside of us is already the result of a false and unjustifiable application of the
principle of sufficient reason. If truth alone had been the deciding factor in the gen¬
esis of language, and if the standpoint of certainty had been decisive for designations,
then how could we still dare to say “the stone is hard,” as if “hard” were something
otherwise familiar to us, and not merely a totally subjective stimulation! We separate
things according to gender, designating the tree as masculine and the plant as feminine.
What arbitrary assignments!3 How far this oversteps the canons of certainty! We speak
of a “snake”: this designation touches only upon its ability to twist itself and could
therefore also fit a worm.4 What arbitrary differentiations! What one-sided preferences,
first for this, then for that property of a thing! The various languages placed side by
side show that with words it is never a question of truth, never a question of adequate
expression; otherwise, there would not be so many languages. The “thing in itself”
(which is precisely what the pure truth, apart from any of its consequences, would
be) is likewise something quite incomprehensible to the creator of language and some¬
thing not in the least worth striving for. This creator only designates the relations of
things to men, and for expressing these relations he lays hold of the boldest metaphors.
To begin with, a nerve stimulus is transferred into an image:5 first metaphor. The image,
in turn, is imitated in a sound: second metaphor. And each time there is a complete
overleaping of one sphere, right into the middle of an entirely new and different one.
One can imagine a man who is totally deaf and has never had a sensation of sound
and music. Perhaps such a person will gaze with astonishment at Chladni’s sound figures;6
perhaps he will discover their causes in the vibrations of the string and will now swear
that he must know what men mean by “sound.” It is this way with all of us concern¬
ing language: we believe that we know something about the things themselves when
we speak of trees, colors, snow, and flowers; and yet we possess nothing but metaphors
for things — metaphors which correspond in no way to the original entities. In the
same way that the sound appears as a sand figure, so the mysterious X of the thing

3 All common nouns in Gennan are assigned a gender: the tree is der Baum, the plant is die
Pflanze.

4 Schlange, the German for “snake,” is related to the verb schlingen (to wind or twist).

5 In German: Bild.

6 Ernst Florens Friedrich Chladni (1756—1827), German physicist, was one of the founders
of modem scientific acoustics. His “sound figures,” sometimes called “Chladni figures” or “sand
figures,” are patterns made on a sand-covered flat surface by the sonic vibrations produced by
a string affixed below the plane.

ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE (1873)

117

in itself first appears as a nerve stimulus, then as an image, and finally as a sound. Thus
the genesis of language does not proceed logically in any case, and all the material within
and with which the man of truth, the scientist, and the philosopher later work and build,
if not derived from never-never land,7 is at least not derived from the essence of things.

In particular, let us further consider the formation of concepts. Every word instantly
becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the
unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but
rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more
or less similar cases - which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal
and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things.
Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain
that the concept “leaf” is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences
and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects. This awakens the idea that, in addition
to the leaves, there exists in nature the “leaf”: the original model according to which
all the leaves were perhaps woven, sketched, measured, colored, curled, and painted
— but by incompetent hands, so that no specimen has turned out to be a correct,
trustworthy, and faithful likeness of the original model. We call a person “honest,” and
then we ask “why has he behaved so honestly today?” Our usual answer is, “on account
of his honesty.” Honesty! This in turn means that the leaf is the cause of the leaves.
We know nothing whatsoever about an essential quality called “honesty”; but we do
know of countless individualized and consequently unequal actions which we equate
by omitting the aspects in which they are unequal and which we now designate as
“honest” actions. Finally we formulate from them a qualitas occulta ,8 which has the
name “honesty.” We obtain the concept, as we do the form, by overlooking what is
individual and actual; whereas nature is acquainted with no forms and no concepts,
and likewise with no species, but only with an X which remains inaccessible and
undefmable for us. For even our contrast between individual and species is something
anthropomorphic and does not originate in the essence of things; although we should
not presume to claim that this contrast does not correspond to the essence of things:
that would of course be a dogmatic assertion and, as such, would be just as indemon¬
strable as its opposite.

What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropo¬
morphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetor¬
ically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a
people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have for¬
gotten are illusions; they are metaphors that have become worn out and have been
drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now con¬
sidered as metal and no longer as coins.

We still do not yet know where the drive for truth comes from. For so far we have
heard only of the duty which society imposes in order to exist: to be truthful means
to employ the usual metaphors. Thus, to express it morally, this is the duty to lie accord¬
ing to a fixed convention, to lie with the herd and in a manner binding upon every¬
one. Now man of course forgets that this is the way things stand for him. Thus he
lies in the manner indicated, unconsciously and in accordance with habits which are
centuries old; and precisely by means of this unconsciousness and forgetfulness he arrives

7 In German: Wolkenkukuksheim (literally, “cloud-cuckoo-land”).

8 Latin: occult quality.

118

II EARLY WRITINGS

at his sense of truth. From the sense that one is obliged to designate one thing as
“red,” another as “cold,” and a third as “mute,” there arises a moral impulse in regard
to truth. The venerability, reliability, and utility of truth is something which a person
demonstrates for himself from the contrast with the liar, whom no one trusts and every¬
one excludes. As a “rational” being, he now places his behavior under the control of
abstractions. He will no longer tolerate being carried away by sudden impressions, by
intuitions. First he universalizes all these impressions into less colorful, cooler concepts,
so that he can entrust the guidance of his life and conduct to them. Everything which
distinguishes man from the animals depends upon this ability to volatilize perceptual
metaphors in a schema, and thus to dissolve an image into a concept. For something
is possible in the realm of these schemata which could never be achieved with the
vivid first impressions: the construction of a pyramidal order according to castes and
degrees, the creation of a new world of laws, privileges, subordinations, and clearly
marked boundaries — a new world, one which now confronts that other vivid world
of first impressions as more solid, more universal, better known, and more human
than the immediately perceived world, and thus as the regulative and imperative world.
Whereas each perceptual metaphor is individual and without equals and is therefore
able to elude all classification, the great edifice of concepts displays the rigid regular¬
ity of a Roman columbarium9 10 and exhales in logic that strength and coolness which
is characteristic of mathematics. Anyone who has felt this cool breath [of logic] will
hardly believe that even the concept — which is as bony, foursquare, and transposable
as a die — is nevertheless merely the residue of a metaphor, and that the illusion which
is involved in the artistic transference of a nerve stimulus into images is, if not the
mother, then the grandmother of every single concept. But in this conceptual crap
game “truth” means using every die in the designated manner, counting its spots accu¬
rately, fashioning the right categories, and never violating the order of caste and class
rank. Just as the Romans and Etruscans cut up the heavens with rigid mathematical
lines and confined a god within each of the spaces thereby delimited, as within a tem-
plum,w so every people has a similarly mathematically divided conceptual heaven above
themselves and henceforth thinks that truth demands that each conceptual god be sought
only within his own sphere. Here one may certainly admire man as a mighty genius
of construction, who succeeds in piling up an infinitely complicated dome of con¬
cepts upon an unstable foundation, and, as it were, on running water. Of course, in
order to be supported by such a foundation, his construction must be like one con¬
structed of spiders’ webs: delicate enough to be carried along by the waves, strong
enough not to be blown apart by every wind. As a genius of construction man raises
himself far above the bee in the following way: whereas the bee builds with wax that
he gathers from nature, man builds with the far more delicate conceptual material
which he first has to manufacture from himself. In this he is greatly to be admired,
but not on account of his drive for truth or for pure knowledge of things. When
someone hides something behind a bush and looks for it again in the same place and
finds it there as well, there is not much to praise in such seeking and finding. Yet this
is how matters stand regarding seeking and finding “truth” within the realm of reason.

9 Vault with niches for funeral urns containing the ashes of cremated bodies.

10 Delimited space restricted to a particular purpose, especially a religiously sanctified area.

ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE (1873)

119

If I make up the definition of a mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel, declare
“look, a mammal,” I have indeed brought a truth to light in this way, but it is a truth
of limited value. That is to say, it is a thoroughly anthropomorphic truth which con¬
tains not a single point which would be “true in itself” or really and universally valid
apart from man. At bottom, what the investigator of such truths is seeking is only the
metamorphosis of the world into man. He strives to understand the world as something
analogous to man, and at best he achieves by his struggles the feeling of assimilation.
Similar to the way in which astrologers considered the stars to be in man’s service and
connected with his happiness and sorrow, such an investigator considers the entire uni¬
verse in connection with man: the entire universe as the infinitely fractured echo of one
original sound — man; the entire universe as the infinitely multiplied copy of one original
picture — man. His method is to treat man as the measure of all things, but in doing so
he again proceeds from the error of believing that he has these things [which he intends
to measure] immediately before him as mere objects. He forgets that the original
perceptual metaphors are metaphors and takes them to be the things themselves.

Only by forgetting this primitive world of metaphor can one live with any repose,
security, and consistency: only by means of the petrification and coagulation of a mass
of images which originally streamed from the primal faculty of human imagination
like a fiery liquid, only in the invincible faith that this sun, this window, this table is
a truth in itself, in short, only by forgetting that he himself is an artistically creating sub¬
ject, does man live with any repose, security, and consistency. If but for an instant he
could escape from the prison walls of this faith, his “self consciousness” would be imme¬
diately destroyed. It is even a difficult thing for him to admit to himself that the insect
or the bird perceives an entirely different world from the one that man does, and that
the question of which of these perceptions of the world is the more correct one is
quite meaningless, for this would have to have been decided previously in accordance
with the criterion of the correct perception, which means, in accordance with a criterion
which is not available. But in any case it seems to me that “the correct perception”
- which would mean “the adequate expression of an object in the subject” - is a con¬
tradictory impossibility. For between two absolutely different spheres, as between sub¬
ject and object, there is no causality, no correctness, and no expression; there is, at
most, an aesthetic relation: I mean, a suggestive transference, a stammering translation
into a completely foreign tongue — for which there is required, in any case, a freely
inventive intermediate sphere and mediating force. “Appearance”11 is a word that con¬
tains many temptations, which is why I avoid it as much as possible. For it is not true
that the essence of things “appears”12 in the empirical world. A painter without hands
who wished to express in song the picture before his mind would, by means of this
substitution of spheres, still reveal more about the essence of things than does the empir¬
ical world. Even the relationship of a nerve stimulus to the generated image is not a
necessary one. But when the same image has been generated millions of times and
has been handed down for many generations and finally appears on the same occasion
every time for all mankind, then it acquires at last the same meaning for men it would
have if it were the sole necessary image and if the relationship of the original nerve
stimulus to the generated image were a strictly causal one. In the same manner, an

1 1 In Gemian: Erscheinung.

12 In Gemian: erscheint.

120

II EARLY WRITINGS

eternally repeated dream would certainly be felt and judged to be reality. But the hard¬
ening and congealing of a metaphor guarantees absolutely nothing concerning its neces¬
sity and exclusive justification.

Every person who is familiar with such considerations has no doubt felt a deep mis¬
trust of all idealism of this sort: just as often as he has quite clearly convinced himself
of the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and infallibility of laws of nature. He has
concluded that so far as we can penetrate here - from the telescopic heights to the
microscopic depths — everything is secure, complete, infinite, regular, and without any
gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and all the things
that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other. How little does
this resemble a product of the imagination, for if it were such, there should be some
place where the illusion and unreality can be divined. Against this, the following must
be said: if each of us had a different kind of sense perception — if we could only
perceive things now as a bird, now as a worm, now as a plant, or if one of us saw a
stimulus as red, another as blue, while a third even heard the same stimulus as a sound
— then no one would speak of such a regularity of nature, rather, nature would be
grasped only as a creation which is subjective in the highest degree. After all, what is
a law of nature as such for us? We are not acquainted with it in itself, but only with
its effects, which means in its relation to other laws of nature — which, in turn, are
known to us only as sums of relations. Therefore all these relations always refer again
to others and are thoroughly incomprehensible to us in their essence. All that we actu¬
ally know about these laws of nature is what we ourselves bring to them — time and
space, and therefore relationships of succession and number. But everything marvelous
about the laws of nature, everything that quite astonishes us therein and seems to demand
our explanation, everything that might lead us to distrust idealism: all this is com¬
pletely and solely contained within the mathematical strictness and inviolability of our
representations of time and space. But we produce these representations in and from
ourselves with same necessity with which the spider spins. If we are forced to com¬
prehend all things only under these forms, then it ceases to be amazing that in all
things we actually comprehend nothing but these forms. For they must all bear within
themselves the laws of number, and it is precisely number which is most astonishing
in things. All that conformity to law, which impresses us so much in the movement
of the stars and in chemical processes, coincides at bottom with those properties which
we bring to things. Thus it is we who impress ourselves in this way. In conjunction
with this, it of course follows that the artistic process of metaphor formation with
which every sensation begins in us already presupposes these forms and thus occurs
within them. The only way in which the possibility of subsequently constructing a
new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves can be explained is by the firm
persistence of these original forms. That is to say, this conceptual edifice is an imita¬
tion of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor.

2

We have seen how it is originally language which works on the construction of concepts,
a labor taken over in later ages by science. 13 Just as the bee simultaneously constructs

13 In German: Wissenschaft. The word refers to any rigorous and systematic inquiry, and is
not restricted to the natural sciences.

ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE (1873)

121

cells and fills them with honey, so science works unceasingly on this great colum¬
barium of concepts, the graveyard of perceptions. It is always building new, higher
stories and shoring up, cleaning, and renovating the old cells; above all, it takes pains
to fill up this monstrously towering framework and to arrange therein the entire empir¬
ical world, which is to say, the anthropomorphic world. Whereas the man of action
binds his life to reason and its concepts so that he will not be swept away and lost,
the scientific investigator builds his hut right next to the tower of science so that
he will be able to work on it and to find shelter for himself beneath those bulwarks
which presently exist. And he requires shelter, for there are frightful powers which
continuously break in upon him, powers which oppose scientific “truth” with com¬
pletely different kinds of “truths” which bear on their shields the most varied sorts of
emblems.

The drive toward the formation of metaphors is the fundamental human drive, which
one cannot for a single instant dispense with in thought, for one would thereby dis¬
pense with man himself. This drive is not truly vanquished and scarcely subdued by
the fact that a regular and rigid new world is constructed as its prison from its own
ephemeral products, the concepts. It seeks a new realm and another channel for its
activity, and it finds this in myth and in art generally. This drive continually confuses
the conceptual categories and cells by bringing forward new transferences, metaphors,
and metonymies. It continually manifests an ardent desire to refashion the world which
presents itself to waking man, so that it will be as colorful, irregular, lacking in results
and coherence, charming, and eternally new as the world of dreams. Indeed, it is only
by means of the rigid and regular web of concepts that the waking man clearly sees
that he is awake; and it is precisely because of this that he sometimes thinks that he
must be dreaming when this web of concepts is torn by art. Pascal is right in main¬
taining that if the same dream came to us every night we would be just as occupied
with it as we are with the things that we see every day. “If a workman were sure to
dream for twelve straight hours every night that he was king,” said Pascal, “I believe
that he would be just as happy as a king who dreamt for twelve hours every night that
he was a workman.”14 In fact, because of the way that myth takes it for granted that
miracles are always happening, the waking life of a mythically inspired people - the
ancient Greeks, for instance - more closely resembles a dream than it does the wak¬
ing world of a scientifically disenchanted thinker. When every tree can suddenly speak
as a nymph, when a god in the shape of a bull can drag away maidens, when even
the goddess Athena herself is suddenly seen in the company of Peisistratus driving
through the market place of Athens with a beautiful team of horses15 — and this
is what the honest Athenian believed — then, as in a dream, anything is possible
at each moment, and all of nature swarms around man as if it were nothing but a

14 Blaise Pascal (1623—62), French prose writer and convert to Jansenism who also made
contributions to mathematics, physics, and religious controversy. Author of Les Lettres provin-
ciales ( Provincial Letters, 1656—7) and the posthumously published Pensees (written 1657—8). The
passage quoted here is from Pensees, no. 386 (Brunschwicg edn).

15 According to Herodotus ( History , I. 60), the tyrant Peisistratus adopted the following ruse
to secure his popular acceptance upon his return from exile: he entered Athens in a chariot
accompanied by a woman named Phye who was dressed in the costume of Athena. Thus the
people were supposed to have been convinced that it was the goddess herself who was con¬
ducting the tyrant back to the Acropolis.

122

II EARLY WRITINGS

masquerade of the gods, who were merely amusing themselves by deceiving men in
all these shapes.

But man has an invincible inclination to allow himself to be deceived and is, as it
were, enchanted with happiness when the rhapsodist tells him epic fables as if they
were true, or when the actor in the theater acts more royally than any real king. So
long as it is able to deceive without injuring, that master of deception, the intellect, is
free; it is released from its former slavery and celebrates its Saturnalia.16 It is never
more luxuriant, richer, prouder, more clever and more daring. With creative pleasure
it throws metaphors into confusion and displaces the boundary stones of abstractions,
so that, for example, it designates the stream as “the moving path which carries man
where he would otherwise walk.” The intellect has now thrown the token of bondage
from itself. At other times it endeavors, with gloomy officiousness, to show the way
and to demonstrate the tools to a poor individual who covets existence; it is like a
servant who goes in search of booty and prey for his master. But now it has become
the master and it dares to wipe from its face the expression of indigence. In compar¬
ison with its previous conduct, everything that it now does bears the mark of dis¬
simulation, just as that previous conduct did of distortion. The free intellect copies
human life, but it considers this life to be something good and seems to be quite satisfied
with it. That immense framework and planking of concepts to which the needy man
clings his whole life long in order to preserve himself is nothing but a scaffolding and
toy for the most audacious feats of the liberated intellect. And when it smashes this
framework to pieces, throws it into confusion, and puts it back together in an ironic
fashion, pairing the most alien things and separating the closest, it is demonstrating
that it has no need of these makeshifts of indigence and that it will now be guided
by intuitions rather than by concepts. There is no regular path which leads from these
intuitions into the land of ghostly schemata, the land of abstractions. There exists no
word for these intuitions; when man sees them he grows dumb, or else he speaks only
in forbidden metaphors and in unheard-of combinations of concepts. He does this so
that by shattering and mocking the old conceptual barriers he may at least correspond
creatively to the impression of the powerful present intuition.

There are ages in which the rational man and the intuitive man stand side by side,
the one in fear of intuition, the other with scorn for abstraction. The latter is just as
irrational as the former is inartistic. They both desire to rule over life: the former, by
knowing how to meet his principal needs by means of foresight, prudence, and regu¬
larity; the latter, by disregarding these needs and, as an “oveijoyed hero,” counting
as real only that life which has been disguised as illusion and beauty. Whenever, as
was perhaps the case in ancient Greece, the intuitive man handles his weapons more
authoritatively and victoriously than his opponent, then, under favorable circumstances,
a culture can take shape and art’s mastery over life can be established. All the mani¬
festations of such a life will be accompanied by this dissimulation, this disavowal of
indigence, this glitter of metaphorical intuitions, and, in general, this immediacy of
deception: neither the house, nor the gait, nor the clothes, nor the clay jugs give evid¬
ence of having been invented because of a pressing need. It seems as if they were all

16 Roman religious festival held annually in December in honor of Saturn; the
prototype of modem Christmas celebrations. Unusually, the merry-making extended to slaves,
who were served by their masters for the day.

ON TRUTH AND LIES IN A NONMORAL SENSE (1873)

123

intended to express an exalted happiness, an Olympian cloudlessness, and, as it were,
a playing with seriousness. The man who is guided by concepts and abstractions only
succeeds by such means in warding off misfortune, without ever gaining any happi¬
ness for himself from these abstractions. And while he aims for the greatest possible
freedom from pain, the intuitive man, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps
from his intuition a harvest of continually inflowing illumination, cheer, and redemp¬
tion — in addition to obtaining a defense against misfortune. To be sure, he suffers
more intensely, when he suffers; he even suffers more frequently, since he does not
understand how to learn from experience and keeps falling over and over again into
the same ditch. He is then just as irrational in sorrow as he is in happiness: he cries
aloud and will not be consoled. How differently the stoical man who learns from experi¬
ence and governs himself by concepts is affected by the same misfortunes! This man,
who at other times seeks nothing but sincerity, truth, freedom from deception, and
protection against ensnaring surprise attacks, now executes a masterpiece of deception:
he executes his masterpiece of deception in misfortune, as the other type of man
executes his in times of happiness. He wears no quivering and changeable human face,
but, as it were, a mask with dignified, symmetrical features. He does not cry; he does
not even alter his voice. When a real storm cloud thunders above him, he wraps him¬
self in his cloak, and with slow steps he walks from beneath it.